Snooki and the Handbag

[0] This is Hidden Brain.

[1] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[2] Many of us like to think that we're not affected by pure pressure.

[3] Come on!

[4] What's your problem?

[5] Oh, great.

[6] We believe we're independent thinkers, that our choices are our own, that our values and preferences are inherent to our personalities, not the whims or wishes of others.

[7] It turns out, reality is a bit more complicated.

[8] Everywhere in life, at work, at school, In a big stadium with thousands of other people, at home in the privacy of our own bedrooms, it turns out our behavior is shaped by the judgment, norms, and actions of other people.

[9] Sometimes we can feel these influences, but more often than not, they're so subtle, we don't even notice their existence.

[10] Today we bring you a favorite episode from 2016 that looks more close to, and how these forces act on us.

[11] Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

[12] He is the author of the book, Invisible Influence, The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior.

[13] Jonah, welcome to Hidden Brain.

[14] Thanks so much for having me. Companies often pay celebrities to hawk their merchandise, so I often see athletes wearing clothes with the Nike swoosh.

[15] Tiffany apparently once paid Anne Hathaway $750 ,000 to wear its jewelry, at the Oscars.

[16] But a few years ago, you tell the story of how Abercrombie and Fitch made an unusual offer to the stars of Jersey Shore.

[17] What was that offer?

[18] So you may remember the Jersey Shore, sort of a bunch of early 20s folks, lots of fake Tanner and big muscles.

[19] I was in the jacuzzi, and clothes just started coming off, so we decided to have a little fun.

[20] And one of them was a guy named Mike the Situation Sorrentino, and he was called The Situation for his famous abs.

[21] hate on me all you want to, but what can you possibly say to somebody that looks like Rambo pretty much with a shirt all?

[22] And Abercrombie and Fitch sent him a letter offering to pay him money, and that by itself is not unusual, right?

[23] As you mentioned, product placement is a major thing that companies often use.

[24] What was interesting about this letter, though, was they weren't offering to pay him money to wear their clothes.

[25] They were actually paying him not to wear their clothes.

[26] And it turns out he wasn't the only Jersey Shore cast member who had a recent run -in with the brand.

[27] Another cast member, She was the short one.

[28] You may remember who's been termed as looking like a parking cone because she wore so much orange fake tanner.

[29] She got a free handbag in the mail.

[30] And obviously, again, sending a free handbag makes sense.

[31] Brands may want to send it to her because she shows up in People magazine or in touch and because she's wearing it.

[32] Other people might wear the brand.

[33] Except she got a Gucci handbag, not from Gucci, but one of their competitors.

[34] And so why would a competitor send her a free handbag?

[35] Why would Abercrombie and Fitch offer to pay Mike the situation not to wear their clothes?

[36] And it turns out influence is very much like a magnet.

[37] We often think about it attracting, doing the same thing as others, but just it often repels us and leads us to the opposite.

[38] And the idea here is, well, if Mike the situation is wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, maybe other people aren't going to want to wear it anymore.

[39] Or if Snooki's hanging on to a Gucci handbag, maybe that'll help their competitors because no one will want to wear Gucci anymore.

[40] So we need to understand how social influence attracts, but also how it repels.

[41] You and Chip Heath at Stanford University ran a similar experiment some years ago, and this one involved wristbands.

[42] Walk me through what you did and what you found.

[43] This is one of my first studies that I ran early on in graduate school.

[44] You may remember these yellow Livestrong wristbands.

[45] They were for Lance Armstrong's Livestrong Foundation.

[46] And they came out.

[47] People were quite interested in them at the beginning, and we sold them to a group on campus.

[48] So we were knocked on doors.

[49] We said, hey, we're raising money for cancer awareness.

[50] Will you buy one of these wristbands and wear it for a dollar?

[51] Most people said, yes, they were more than happy to wear it.

[52] We followed up a week later to see if many people were wearing them.

[53] They were, so indeed people wearing the wristband.

[54] And then we did something interesting.

[55] We sold them to a dorm next door.

[56] And we wanted to see, similar to this example of Mike the situation wearing Abercrombie or a snooky carrying Gucci handbag, how would people feel when other people they didn't want to be associated with started wearing the bands?

[57] And so there's a dorm on Stanford campus, sort of known as the geeky dorm on campus.

[58] And basically, we went next door and we sold these wristbands to the geeks.

[59] And so the question was, what would those original wristband wearers do, the people that like the wristband that we're wearing it all the time, do once the geeks started wearing it.

[60] And sure enough, as soon as the geeks started wearing it, about a third of the people in that initial group stopped wearing it.

[61] And they stopped because they didn't want to be associated with the geeks, right?

[62] Once those geeky folks were doing it, they didn't want to do it anymore.

[63] So what you're really saying is that one really effective way to get people to buy your brand or buy your product is make sure that the people they despise are buying other brands?

[64] Is that what you're saying?

[65] A little bit.

[66] Yeah, we often think about sort of aspiration identities.

[67] So Abercrombie shows people that we might want to look like in their ads.

[68] But we think a lot less about, well, what might people want to avoid doing something if other people are doing?

[69] We did another study with health behavior showing people actually avoided binge drinking in college when we associated with an identity that was undesired for them.

[70] And so it's not just about associating things with desired behaviors to get people to do it.

[71] It's also about saying, well, how can we associate undesired behaviors with undesired identities and use that to avoid people doing the wrong thing.

[72] One of the interesting things about the entire field of social psychology, and you talk about this at some length in the book, is the idea that people don't see themselves as clearly as they see other people, or they see themselves and their choices differently than the same choices made by other people.

[73] And part of that is the access we have to the reasons that we bought things.

[74] So when we look around, we see lots of people doing similar things.

[75] At the end of the day, we're all pretty similar, right?

[76] Most of us are not like Lady Gaga walking around in a meat dress.

[77] Most of us are wearing shorts and T -shirts, jeans in a collared shirt.

[78] We dress pretty similarly.

[79] We drive similar cars.

[80] We buy similar things.

[81] And so, indeed, when we look around, we see a lot of people acting similarly, and we see influence and assume it's happening.

[82] When we look to ourselves, though, we look to our introspections.

[83] We don't just say, well, what did I behave?

[84] What did I do?

[85] But we look for evidence that there's a reason that we behave that way.

[86] And because when we think about it, well, I don't think I bought that car to fit.

[87] in.

[88] I wasn't sitting there going, God, I really want to keep up with the Joneses.

[89] You thought you bought it because of price or you thought you bought it because you liked how it looked.

[90] So, you don't think it affected your own behavior, even though at the end of the day, it actually did.

[91] You tell a story in the book about a friend of yours who's a lawyer, and he has some strong views about younger lawyers and their BMWs.

[92] Yeah, so I was writing this book, and I was talking to a good friend of mine who's from Washington, D .C., and they happen to be a lawyer.

[93] And I was telling them about social influence, and they were lamenting the impact of social influence on their peers.

[94] They were saying, God, you know, all D .C. lawyers are the same.

[95] They make it big.

[96] They, you know, they become partner, whatever it is, and they go out and they buy a new BMW.

[97] And I said, well, that's interesting.

[98] But, you know, aren't you a D .C. lawyer?

[99] I said to my friend, and, you know, don't you drive a BMW also?

[100] And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[101] But, you know, they all drive gray ones, and I drive a blue one.

[102] And I was sitting in a girl.

[103] like, okay, I guess.

[104] But what I love about that story is two things, right?

[105] One, again, we see influence, right?

[106] My friend could see all the other people driving very similar cars, except when that light shone on his own behavior, he couldn't see it.

[107] Then it was invisible.

[108] There, the influence was invisible.

[109] But second, it wasn't just about doing the same thing.

[110] It wasn't just about buying the exact same car.

[111] And it wasn't about being completely different.

[112] It's about being similar and different at the same time.

[113] And so there are many flavors of influence that often invisibly affect our behavior.

[114] One of the interesting ideas you explore is that social influence can have implications for innovation, because it suggests that if we are shaped by those around us, then an idea that in some ways is too far ahead or too different from the norms that we see around us might have a difficult time getting adopted.

[115] Can you tell me the story of the 1899 invention known as horsey, horseless?

[116] This is an amazing story that I came across while doing for research for the book.

[117] And it turns out that when automobiles came out, it's hard to remember that in today's day and age when we see automobiles all the time.

[118] But when they first came out, they were very scary.

[119] People had never seen a non -horse -driven carriage.

[120] Imagine this thing sort of almost like a ghost rolling down the street by itself.

[121] No horse pulling it, no person pulling it.

[122] People in rural areas called it the devil's work and, you know, banned it from town.

[123] And so people were trying to figure, well, how do we get this thing adopted?

[124] It obviously saved costs in a certain way.

[125] There was a huge amount of manure on the street, so getting rid of horses was good in some ways.

[126] They could travel further.

[127] How could they get people to adopt this new innovation?

[128] And what's interesting is the challenge wasn't a functional one.

[129] It wasn't that the product didn't work.

[130] It was a psychological one.

[131] The product was fine, but they had to overcome it feeling too different.

[132] And indeed, it's a little bit like Goldilocks and the three bears, if you think about it, right?

[133] One end is too different.

[134] Something's too different.

[135] It's scary.

[136] We don't want to adopt it.

[137] It's too far away.

[138] if at the same time something exactly the same as what people are doing, people don't want adopt it.

[139] Why do I need to change my behavior for something that's exactly the same?

[140] But in the middle is just right, is what might be called optimally distinct, if you will.

[141] And so going back to the automobile, this inventor came up with a really interesting idea to solve this problem.

[142] And he'd come up with many innovations, including a desk for students and a sort of a leg cast to help people to recover after injuries.

[143] He said, God, you know, if the problem is psychological, I have an idea.

[144] So he came out with this innovation.

[145] called The Horsy Horseless, which is essentially taking a fake horsehead and putting it on the front of an automobile.

[146] And you look at this thing and you say, why would a fake horsehead be anywhere near useful in helping people adopt an automobile?

[147] But what it did is it made the different feel more familiar, made it feel more similar, right?

[148] It was just a fake horsehead, but it made it look like these vehicles that people were used to already.

[149] It made horses feel more comfortable when this thing pulled up next to them at the stop sign or the stoplight of the day, if it were.

[150] It made people feel more familiar with the difference.

[151] And so this idea of optimal distinctivist is really important.

[152] Not so different.

[153] If it's so different, people are scared.

[154] They don't want to adopt it.

[155] It's scary.

[156] It's new.

[157] Why do I want to do this thing?

[158] Same if it's too similar.

[159] But in the middle, and it's just right.

[160] In the middle, it's optimally distinct and much more likely to catch on.

[161] So as I was reading this section of the book, I started thinking immediately about driverless cars and the concerns and trepidations that many people have about cars that seem to drive themselves.

[162] I mean, talk about, you know, a ghost in the machine.

[163] And, you know, I was thinking about, you know, people sometimes have these mannequins that sit in the car with them to give people the impression that there's someone in the car with them.

[164] So if you're a woman driving through a city street at night and you want to give people the illusion that you're not alone in the car and you're maybe less vulnerable to crime, you have this mannequin sitting next to you.

[165] And I realize what we should do is take the mannequin and put the mannequin in the driver's seat.

[166] And if you did that, that's essentially going to be our version of horsey -horses.

[167] It's almost like a taxi driver, except it's a mannequin.

[168] I love that idea.

[169] You should write to Google and Uber and suggest it.

[170] But again, you're thinking really correctly about it.

[171] A driverless car doesn't have to look like a car, right?

[172] I mean, if all it's doing is getting us from point A to point B, why does it have to look like a car?

[173] Why does it have to have a steering wheel, any of these things?

[174] But part of it is not just the function.

[175] It's the psychology.

[176] Does it feel safe?

[177] And having someone, even if it's a mannequin sitting in the driver's seat, might make us feel more comfortable.

[178] Coming up, we're going to explore how invisible influence affects the way we think about politics.

[179] So the simple idea here is it's often party over policy.

[180] Even the same policy, even the same actual thing, we interpret that thing based on who's supporting it.

[181] Stay with us.

[182] This is Hidden Brain.

[183] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[184] We're talking today with the University of Pennsylvania's Jonah Berger.

[185] Most of us believe we come to our political views after careful thought and consideration.

[186] But there's been a lot of recent social science research that shows that our views are heavily shaped by social context.

[187] Even when it comes to our understanding of the facts, we're biased by the thoughts and opinions of those around us.

[188] I asked Jonah Berger if this was part of the world of invisible influence.

[189] A colleague of mine did a great study a few years ago looking at exactly this.

[190] So he gave both liberals and conservatives a number of different policy propositions.

[191] So one was about helping disadvantaged people, one was about taxes, a bunch of different policies.

[192] And he told them that those policies were either supported by Democrats or Republicans.

[193] What he found very much along the lines of what you just mentioned is that when conservatives saw a policy, the same policy, if they thought that policy was supported by conservatives, they loved the policy.

[194] They thought it was great.

[195] They supported it.

[196] You know, even if it was a welfare policy, even if it was a generous welfare policy, the fact that conservatives seemed to like it, the fact they were told that other conservatives leaders supported it, they thought it was great.

[197] They thought it was terrible, though, if that same policy, that same liberal welfare policy was supported by liberals.

[198] Oh, the liberals, they're always doing this, you know, helpful stuff for welfare.

[199] I'm totally, totally against it.

[200] Same policy, completely different reaction.

[201] Liberals did exactly the same thing.

[202] When liberals were told that policy was supported by liberals, they loved it.

[203] When liberals were told conservatives like the policy, they hated it.

[204] And so the simple idea here is it's often party over policy, even the same policy, even the same actual thing, we interpret that thing based on who's supporting it, right?

[205] Based on the identity at signals.

[206] And this actually happened to me just a few months ago, so was doing a consulting project with messaging for an organization that wanted to help clean energy catch on among conservatives.

[207] And clean energy is something that they thought conservatives would support.

[208] After all, it saves tax dollars, it reduces the size of government, all things that conservatives should like.

[209] Yet when they surveyed conservatives, they found that conservatives weren't supporting clean energy.

[210] And so they dug a little deeper and they found that there was a clear reason why.

[211] When they asked conservatives, particularly conservative leaders, why conservative leaders weren't supporting the policy, they said, oh, yeah, clean energy?

[212] You know, solar power, wind power.

[213] Well, isn't that something that Al Gore likes?

[214] And if Al Gore likes it, it's probably not for me. And what's so interesting there again is same policy, right?

[215] Yet the mere fact that was associated with a prominent liberal, like Al Gore, made them not want to do it.

[216] And so we really need to think about the politics, not just of actual politics, but the politics of identity.

[217] What does it mean to engage in a certain behavior?

[218] What does it signal about me to do something or not do something?

[219] And how can we use that to help people do better things?

[220] I mean, there are a lot of political scientists who talk about our affiliation with political parties as being very analogous to our support for various sports teams.

[221] So I'm a devout fan of a football team.

[222] And of course, every year the players on that team change.

[223] And it's completely irrational to support the team when all the people playing for the team have changed.

[224] But there's a famous line from Jerry Seinfeld.

[225] You know, what we're really doing is we're rooting for laundry.

[226] And at some level, we're doing that with politics too.

[227] I mean, what we're really doing is we're rooting for laundry.

[228] I love that phrase rooting for laundry.

[229] And certainly, you know, that's part of it, right?

[230] Part of it is it feels like a team identity.

[231] There's also some information there, right?

[232] There's this notion that, God, if a lot of people that I feel similarly to in the past, it's like this.

[233] and support this, I'm going to like it and support it too, right?

[234] If I walk by a restaurant and there's a long line out in front, I assume that restaurant must be better.

[235] Same thing with politics, right?

[236] If the party changes or, you know, the party views change, but everyone still thinks it's that same organization that they know and love, sometimes they end up following the wrong thing.

[237] You know, a few months ago, we cited one of your other studies on Hidden Brain.

[238] It had to do with the likelihood of winning basketball games and what the score was at halftime.

[239] I have to say, I absolutely love this study.

[240] Can you tell us how you came to do the study and what it found?

[241] I used to be a soccer coach, and this is where it actually came from.

[242] So I went to graduate school and undergrad in California at Stanford, loved soccer growing up, and so I decided to become a coach.

[243] So I coached AYSO, sort of the little league of soccer.

[244] Coach is generous, by the way.

[245] I was basically sort of shepherding, you know, 15, 12 -year -old boys and trying to stop them from fighting for an hour and a half twice a week.

[246] But we'd run drills and we'd try to get better, and, you know, hopefully they learned one or two things along the way.

[247] But when it came time to games, I noticed something weird.

[248] We were a good team.

[249] We weren't the best team out there.

[250] We were a good team.

[251] But when we were behind at halftime, we always seemed to figure out a way to win.

[252] So if we were down by a goal, we'd win two one.

[253] If we were down two goals even, sometimes we'd win.

[254] You know, we were down two to zero.

[255] We'd win three to two.

[256] We always figured out a way to pull it out.

[257] And other times, though, if we were tied, are we ahead, we sometimes figured out a way to lose.

[258] And so I was just trying to figure out, God, you know, what am I doing wrong?

[259] If we can come from behind, shouldn't we win all the time?

[260] So with a friend of mine, great colleague my name, Devin Pope, he's now at the University of Chicago, we went out and got tens of thousands of professional basketball games.

[261] We got a bunch of NCAA games, a bunch of NBA games.

[262] And essentially, we looked and said, okay, how does the score at halftime relate to the score at the end of the game?

[263] So how does if a team is ahead or behind at halftime affect whether or not they win or lose?

[264] Similar to my youth soccer team, and hopefully a little more data.

[265] And interesting, by the way, hopefully a little more motivated.

[266] If you're an NBA player, you're getting tens of millions of dollars based on your performance.

[267] So you might say, okay, you know, if you're a 12 -year -old kid and your coach sort of cajoles you and encourages you to play harder, you're more likely to win.

[268] But it shouldn't matter for NBA players, right?

[269] I mean, NBA players are real big stakes, whether they win or lose.

[270] They make more or less money.

[271] Of course it doesn't matter there, right?

[272] So that's what we wanted to look at.

[273] And so we looked at the data, and similar to soccer, we saw something really interesting, which is there was one place where being behind was actually a good thing.

[274] and that was being behind by just a little bit.

[275] Teams that were down by one at halftime, they weren't more like to lose, as everyone else would have been if they were behind.

[276] They were actually more like it to win.

[277] Teams that were down by one were more like to win than teams that were up by one.

[278] Even though they were worse teams, down by two points relative to the teams that were up by one, they had to score more to win.

[279] They came out, they played harder in the second half, and they were more like to win the game.

[280] And so it turns out that competition can affect motivation, right?

[281] How we're doing relative to others matters.

[282] And so being behind can be motivating, but only if you're behind by a little bit.

[283] If you're high by too much, you give up and you're more like to quit.

[284] So I have to tell you, Jonah, that it's been a little more than a decade since I began learning about many of the studies and ideas.

[285] And, you know, I was really taken aback by many of them when I first came by them because I think of myself as being a very rational and deliberate and intentional person.

[286] And the idea that my own actions or beliefs or judgments were being shaped by these factors that lie many cases outside my mind.

[287] conscious awareness was sort of a really disturbing idea to me. I have to say what's interesting is that at an intuitive level, it still feels to me that all my decisions and judgments are conscious and intentional and deliberate.

[288] I don't feel the effects of social pressure except that you look at the mountain of evidence and you have to say if it's affecting all these other people on the planet, it must be affecting me as well.

[289] And I feel like one of the great values of this body of research is it might prompt people to a certain degree of humility of saying, yes, I feel very strongly about the political party I support.

[290] I feel very strongly about the sports team I support.

[291] I feel very strongly about my beliefs, but it's just possible that maybe these beliefs are actually shaped by these other factors, and I might want to be a little humble about the things that I think I know.

[292] I'm wondering, as you've looked at this body of work, what's been the effect on you personally?

[293] What's been the effect on your personal life as you look at all the ways in which human beings are shaped by other people?

[294] You know, you read this literature, and you do some studies in this literature, and you can almost have an existential crisis.

[295] You can say, God, you know, I'm not making any of my own choices.

[296] Other people are making all these things for me. Is there no free will?

[297] Am I just a mindless automaton?

[298] You know, take a great example, and this is something that always struck me. You know, think about the person that we marry, right?

[299] or the person that we end up being our long -term partner, our relationship partner, you know, we all have this sense that they're perfect for us.

[300] You know, we all have this belief in true love and that we're finding the right person out there that completes us, that, you know, the one person whose shoe perfectly fits, the one person who will make us whole.

[301] And yet, is that right, you know, is that there's the one person out there and we just have to find them, or are we subtly being influenced by our environment?

[302] Do we like them because, you know, we saw them more often?

[303] And so we got exposed to them more.

[304] And so mere exposure leads to liking, you know, where we influenced by our environment or do we really make our own choice?

[305] And for a while, I think personally, that was something I struggled with a lot, thinking about, you know, well, do we really make our choices?

[306] And if we don't make our choices, what does that mean about who we are?

[307] And I'm not sure I got to a perfect answer, honestly.

[308] But I think where I ended up is, you know, influence by itself is neither good nor bad.

[309] It is just a way of life.

[310] It is a thing that helps us make our lives easier.

[311] Imagine if we had to make every choice by ourselves.

[312] We couldn't use any information from others.

[313] We couldn't figure out what book to read or what movie to see.

[314] If we moved to a new town, we couldn't figure out what car mechanic to go to without looking at an online review.

[315] We had to just figure it out by ourselves.

[316] Life would be extremely difficult.

[317] And so along the way, we've evolved to take advantage of social information.

[318] to use others as a heuristic or a shortcut to judgment to make it easier to live, you know, faster and easier than it might be otherwise.

[319] Does that heuristic always lead us to the right answer?

[320] No. There are many cases, you know, some of which we've talked about, where other people lead us astray, yet most of the time influence is a valuable tool.

[321] And so I think the more we realize its effect on us, the more we can spot it in the environment around us, the happier and healthier we can be.

[322] We can't fully control it.

[323] you know, it's going to be there all the time.

[324] But the more we understand it, the more we can take advantage of its upsides and avoid its downsides.

[325] Jonah Berger, I want to thank you for talking with me today.

[326] It's been a pleasure having you on Hidden Brain.

[327] Thanks so much for having me. This week's episode was produced by Tara Boyle.

[328] Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Parth Shah, Raina Cohen, Thomas Liu, Laura Querell, and Adithee Ban Lemudi.

[329] Our unsung hero this week is Dana Farrington.

[330] Dana's an editor in NPR and helped us a while back to interview candidates for a new position on our show.

[331] Dana's thoughtful feedback and calm demeanor helped us pick the right person.

[332] Thanks, Dana.

[333] For more Hidden Brain, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

[334] And if you haven't given us a review on your favorite podcasting app, please do so.

[335] It really helps others discover the podcast.

[336] I'm Shankar Vedantham, and this is NPR.